SEO – Are Meta Tags Dead?

For some time now most in the SEO world have been saying that META tag optimization is all but pointless.

Due to the spammy approach that so many webmasters have used  with techniques such as ‘keyword stuffing’ (this is where your favourite search terms are used over and over again in keywords as well as within the content of your web page), search engine giants Google in particular have gradually put less and less emphasis on META information.

‘So should I just not bother then?’ some ask. Well yes and no. We have found that well coded pages will improve ranking a little and this certainly includes the use of accessible META information.

Still worth spending time on are the description and keyword tags. A well written description will always help real people when browsing to visit our page over another one. Keywords need to be present within the keywords tag, but not too many. This should be backed up with keywords withing the text of your page preferably nearer the top of the page and not much more than about 7% of the overall number of different words on the page.

A good tool to help with this can be found here  http://www.webconfs.com/keyword-density-checker.php

There may be some mileage in using Safesurf and ICRA tags for child-friendly sites. We were rather cinical about their use until about the middle of last year when we carried out a test on a few sites. We noticed a measurable increase in search positioning (not much, but enough to bother about) in all the sites we tried this with.

Most of the other tags are probably not worth worrying over, but I know others feel differently about this, so all I have to say is ‘Whatever blows your hair back’.

Truthfully and in conclusion, with so much emphasis on good quality backlinks by Google et al, META tags can almost be dispensed with provided you have enough one-way (non-reciprocal) backlinks from unique ip pools. Text links are an all important way to rank well for your preferred search terms.

DAK